It may be a truism that this country lost more buildings to town planners than to the Luftwaffe, but it is still worth mentioning. Here are 180 pages, each illustrated with one or more photographs, which document what can only be a fraction of the buildings and vistas we have lost.

Stamp quotes a recent conclusion, regarding Hull, but it applies everywhere: "What has gone are the accents of the cityscape, the varied shapes, textures and materials, the undoubted wealth of craftsmanship, the unexpected or bizarre incident; items that there is now no way of matching, for neither money nor skills are forthcoming."

This is, in short, a very depressing book – but one that is wholly necessary. Look, for example, at the photograph of Woburn Square, Bloomsbury, gorgeous enough even without the steeple of Christ Church in the background. The picture was taken in 1941, and you expect to read that this was destroyed in an air raid; but no, the culprit was the University of London, which demolished the church and most of the square in 1974. A quick look at Google Street View confirms that it has not been replaced by anything as lovely – but then you don't really need before-and-after pictures; you know what the replacements look like.

Decades previously, in 1937, Robert Byron could denounce the following for "the ruin of London ... and for destroying without recompense many of the nation's most treasured possessions": "The Church; the Civil Service; the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council; the hereditary landlords; the political parties; the London County Council; the local councils; the great business firms; the motorists; the heads of the national Museum ..." Once the bombers and universities could be added to that roster, that was more or less it – and even when the buildings the former damaged could have been restored, planners, eager to proceed with what they had been itching to do long before the war, demolished on the slightest pretext. (Stamp places the initial blame for the "Baedeker Raids", which destroyed treasured towns devoid of military importance, on our own "Bomber" Harris, "that repellent figure who ... decided to attack the ancient, beautiful cities of Lübeck and Rostock because they were full of old timber buildings which would burn well.")

But you still might come away with very slightly mixed feelings. I would not have cared greatly to go to the frankly scary-looking Royal Insurance buildings in Park Row, Leeds (although the 1950s block shown next to it is as forgettable as it is possible to be), and you can see why the nine-storey tenements in Edinburgh got the chop, or how, as Stamp puts it, the "Victorian and earlier buildings, often smoke-blackened and neglected, were inextricably associated ... with the trauma of industrial decline and the loss of civic pride".

Here, then, is an example of how the opposing forces of good intention and blindness, or utility and greed, can conspire to devastate a country. There was something very silly indeed about Dundee's Royal Arch ("grotesque but loveable", says Stamp, and he's right), but it wasn't in the way or doing anyone any harm, and it was dynamited in 1964 for no good reason.

Coventry's Elizabethan heritage was more or less wiped out in the 1930s; "even without the second world war, old Coventry would probably have been planned out of existence anyway". Its first city architect was delighted to note that the bombs had given him the best chance to put his plans into action, a comment which tells you all you need to know about the priorities of urban planners. And as for Worcester – in 1968, Nikolaus Pevsner was describing as "totally incomprehensible" the mutilation inflicted upon its medieval heritage by its council.

This book could have been many times the size. But there are lessons enough here to be learned by those who are not too deaf to listen or too blind to see; and not everything has been lost. Yet.